1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information recording/reproducing apparatus and an information recording/reproducing method, and in particular, to an information recording/reproducing apparatus that is characterized in a cache control block in a file management area.
2. Related Art Statement
Generally, an information recording/reproducing apparatus such as an optical disk apparatus is used as an external storage in an information processing apparatus. Nevertheless, write processing and read processing to/from a recording medium is slower than the data transfer speed between a host computer and the information recording/reproducing apparatus. Therefore, recently, it has become common to use an information recording/reproducing apparatus that accelerates record processing and reproduction processing of data by providing cache memory in between and performing data transfer through this cache memory. In particular, in an optical disk apparatus using an optical disk as a recording medium, it is common to provide disk cache memory for temporarily storing record data and reproduction data because it needs much time to perform write processing to the recording medium.
In conventional information recording/reproducing apparatuses such as an optical disk, for as example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 8-110868, some information recording/reproducing apparatuses each store a position and length of a file management area, most frequently accessed by a host computer so as all the time in cache memory after the host computer designates the position and length of the file management area at the time of initialization.
The above-described Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 8-110868, however, discloses a file management table transfer means which reads a file management table from any area among a plurality of areas on a recording medium at the time of initialization and transfers the table to a file management table storage area on a cache buffer. Nevertheless, the publication does not disclose a method of setting the quantity, positions, and length of the file management area.
Thus, in the invention disclosed in the Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 8-110868, the file management area cannot be cached all the time without the host computer designating the position and length of the file management area. Therefore, the invention is problematic in that both the host computer (in general, software called a device driver controls recording/reproducing operation) and the information recording/reproducing apparatus each should have a function for caching the file management area all the time. Hence, it is necessary to use a special device driver for this purpose.